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Rules and Results for Verification of

Financial Reports from Five Reporting

Profiles

By

Charles Hoffman, CPA (Charles.Hoffman@me.com)

Last Revised – April 19, 2019 (DRAFT)

This document provides XBRL-based financial report validation results for five different financial

report application profiles and all of the rules that were used to achieve the automated

validation result. Financial reports were verified using the one software application. A second

software application is capable of performing 100% of these same validation tests but currently

only supports two of five profiles.

Copyright (full and complete release of copyright)

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work. This work may be used, altered or unaltered, in any manner by anyone without attribution or

notice to me. To be clear, I am granting full permission to use any content in this work in any way you

like. I fully and completely release all my rights to any copyright on this content. If you feel like

distributing a copy of this work, you may do so without attribution or payment of any kind. All that said,

attribution is appreciated should one feel so compelled. The copyrights of other works referenced by

this document are established by the referenced work.

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This document summarizes the results of validating five different XBRL-based financial reports

from five different application profiles1 and four different financial reporting schemes2. Each of

the reports where validated twice. Validation was performed using the Pesseract working

proof of concept software application3.

First, reports were verified using an approach where all validation rules were physically

connected to the XBRL instance. 100% of all rules are expressed using the XBRL technical

syntax. All the rules are provided and available.

Second, reports were verified using an approach were the XBRL instance is probed, the profile

of the report is automatically determined using software algorithms, the correct validation rules

sets were selected, and the validation processes were run. Again, 100% of the rules were

expressed using the XBRL technical syntax. All the rules are available, however which are used

are not clearly indicated because they are not directly connected to the XBRL instance.

A second software vendor, XBRL Cloud4, can duplicate the validation results for the XASB

profile, the US GAAP as submitted to the SEC profile, and the IFRS as submitted to the SEC

profile. The other profiles are not supported by the second software vendor. The second

software vendor does not support dynamically linked rules, only profile based validation. The

second software vendor only provides an API level validation process which results in human-

readable output being generated. The second software vendor uses an earlier version of some

rules that are not 100% XBRL.

A third test using a command line batch process to run these same validation tests is currently

being perfected.

The details of the automated validation processes that were performed are explained in detail

in the Method of Implementing a Standard Digital Financial Report Using the XBRL Syntax5.

Examples of the details of validation performed are provided for the Microsoft 2017 10-K report

and are available online complements of XBRL Cloud. The following reports are available for

review:

1 XBRL-based Digital Financial Reporting Profiles and General Business Reporting Profile,

http://xbrlsite.azurewebsites.net/2018/Library/Profiles-2018-10-22.pdf 2 Comparison of Financial Reporting Schemes High Level Concepts,

http://xbrlsite.azurewebsites.net/2018/Library/ReportingSchemes-2018-12-30.pdf 3 Pesseract, http://pesseract.azurewebsites.net/ (Note that the currently available version will only validate three

of the XBRL-based reports, the newer version which verifies all will be available in about a month.) 4 XBRL Cloud, https://www.xbrlcloud.com/

5 Method of Implementing a Standard Digital Financial Report Using the XBRL Syntax,

http://xbrl.squarespace.com/journal/2019/1/11/method-of-implementing-a-standard-digital-financial-report-u.html

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1. Human readable evaluation report6

2. Fundamental accounting concept relations cross checks7

3. Combined Reporting Checklist and Disclosure Mechanics validation8

Additional human-readable examples are provided9. Reviewing either the human readable

information or the machine readable information provides a plethora of opportunities to

understand many things about XBRL-based financial reports.

This process works for raw XBRL or for Inline XBRL by running a conversion process to change

Inline XBRL into raw XBRL.

More information will be forth coming.

The following sections provide information for each of the application profiles used to validate

the five XBRL-based financial reports.

The following diagram shows the relation between the metadata used to run report validation.

A machine-readable version is provided for each profile. A human readable version is provided

for US GAAP10.

6 XBRL Cloud Evidence Package, http://xbrlsite.azurewebsites.net/2017/Prototypes/Microsoft2017/evidence-

package/#ReportProperties.html 7 Fundamental Accounting Concept Relations Cross Checks,

http://xbrlsite.azurewebsites.net/2017/Prototypes/Microsoft2017/evidence-package/#USFACRenderingSummary.html 8 XBRL Cloud Reporting Checklist and Disclosure Mechanics Validation,

http://xbrlsite.azurewebsites.net/2017/Prototypes/Microsoft2017/Disclosure%20Mechanics%20and%20Reporting%20Checklist.html 9 Summary of Human Readable Renderings, http://xbrl.squarespace.com/journal/2019/3/23/summary-of-human-

readable-renderings.html 10

Human-readable information about metadata provided for US GAAP, http://xbrlsite.azurewebsites.net/2016/conceptual-model/reporting-scheme/us-gaap/US-GAAP_HUMAN.pdf

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XASB11 (Reporting scheme created for testing purposes) (Connected rules) http://xbrlsite.azurewebsites.net/2016/conceptual-model/reporting-

scheme/xasb/taxonomy/company-instance-DynamicRules.xml

(Used for profile based validation)

http://xbrlsite.azurewebsites.net/2016/conceptual-model/reporting-scheme/xasb/taxonomy/company-

instance.xml

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XASB metadata, http://xbrlsite.azurewebsites.net/2016/conceptual-model/reporting-scheme/xasb/XASB_Machine.pdf

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IPSAS12 (International Public Sector Accounting Standards Prototype) (Connected rules) http://xbrlsite.azurewebsites.net/2016/conceptual-model/reporting-

scheme/ipsas/taxonomy/company-instance-TestDynamic.xml

(Used for profile based validation)

http://xbrlsite.azurewebsites.net/2016/conceptual-model/reporting-scheme/ipsas/taxonomy/company-

instance.xml

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IPSAS metadata, http://xbrlsite.azurewebsites.net/2016/conceptual-model/reporting-scheme/ipsas/IPSAS_Machine.pdf

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US GAAP13 (as submitted to SEC) (Connected rules)

http://xbrlsite.azurewebsites.net/DigitalFinancialReporting/ReferenceImplementation/us-gaap/2017-

05-07/abc-20161231_ExplicitLinksDynamic.xml

(Used for profile based validation)

http://xbrlsite.azurewebsites.net/DigitalFinancialReporting/ReferenceImplementation/us-gaap/2017-

05-07/abc-20161231.xml

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US GAAP metadata, http://xbrlsite.azurewebsites.net/2016/conceptual-model/reporting-scheme/us-gaap/US-GAAP_Machine.pdf

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IFRS14 (as submitted to SEC) (Connected rules)

http://xbrlsite.azurewebsites.net/DigitalFinancialReporting/ReferenceImplementation/ifrs/sec/abev-

20181231_DynamicRules.xml

(Used for profile based validation)

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1565025/000129281419000845/abev-20181231.xml

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IFRS metadata, http://xbrlsite.azurewebsites.net/2016/conceptual-model/reporting-scheme/ifrs/IFRS_Machine.pdf

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IFRS15 (General) (Connected rules)

http://www.xbrlsite.com/DigitalFinancialReporting/ReferenceImplementationIFRS/2016-12-31/sap/sap-

20161231_DynamicRules.xml

(Used for profile based validation)

http://www.xbrlsite.com/DigitalFinancialReporting/ReferenceImplementationIFRS/2016-12-31/sap/sap-

20161231.xml

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IFRS metadata, http://xbrlsite.azurewebsites.net/2016/conceptual-model/reporting-scheme/ifrs/IFRS_Machine.pdf